About a year ago the ABC interviewed me about being a Usability Specialist. They came and videoed me up at the usability lab I use, my home office and even speaking at a conference. It was all quite fun.

“Technologies are amplifiers; they take some innate human capability and reinforce it, far beyond human limits, until it seems almost an entirely new thing. However alien they might seem to us, technologies are simply the funhouse mirror reflection of ourselves.”

Apple announced 100,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK in the first four days.

InfoWorld says:
“…from the work I’m doing with the publicly available preview tools and documentation, I can attest that iPhone will be the simplest, best-documented, and most enjoyable experience for mobile application developers. I have coded fairly extensively with Symbian, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. iPhone just blows them away, making me wonder who decided that mobile development had to be difficult. I’ll take that a step further: If you’re new to programming, iPhone or iPod Touch is a splendid place to start”

It also appears that Apple are including data persistence to web apps on the iPhone (i.e. Google Gears). Very interesting!

And this from AppleInsider on the response to the iFund being run by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:
“According to Matt Murphy, a partner at the firm, his colleagues had a running bet over how many business plans they’d receive from prospective iPhone developers in the first 30-days following the announcement of their fund. While Murphy declined to reveal that number, he said it was easily surpassed within 36 hours.”

El Reg writes about Nokia and their widgets, highlighting the issues Nokia has been experiencing lately:
“For some years now, phones have really been computers in disguise, but Nokia has always stressed their utility as appliances. Today it proudly boasts: “This is what computers have become”, and insists its sales staff call the phones “Multimedia Computers”.
But computers are everything mobiles are not and shouldn’t be: cumbersome to carry with you, complicated and unreliable. It’s like Mercedes branding themselves as “The Lada you always wanted.”

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey [Drexler] ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!'” says Jobs.
But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm. ”
(via Kotke)